Finds of the Week – January 6, 2008

Tips and Tricks

I can’t believe I didn’t know about this Visual Studio command before: File.OpenContainingFolder. Asmita A Wankhede mentioned it, but he left a few important details out. By default, this command does not have a shortcut, so you would have to assign one to it (try CTRL+SHIFT+ALT+O). Also, the "item" that this command works on is the currently opened item in the editor, not the selected item in the Solution Explorer. See my Visual Studio tips article for instructions on how to create new shortcuts (section 3 – Make New Shortcuts).

Aaron Lerch shared a tip on how to use Powershell to perform search-and-replace on an entire folder hierarchy.

If like me, you have heard about SubSonic but don’t know much about it, Kent Sharkey’s Introduction to SubSonic (Dotnetslackers) provides a quick primer.

Software And Tools

Did you know that something called Robocopy (short for Robust File Copy, not Robot Copy), is the new XCOPY? It’s a standard tool in Windows Vista and is also available as part of the Windows Resource Kit. Via Don Box’s Spoutlet on Pluralsight.

I recently tried and liked GhostDoc very much. It’s a free Visual Studio add-in to help write XML documentation comments. Roland Weigelt wrote a nice intro article on GhostDoc on DotnetSlackers here.

SyncBackSE is a great folder synchronization utility. It has tons of features… maybe even a little bit on the bloated side. It costs $30 for a single license. If you just want something simple, Microsoft’s free SyncToy may do the trick for you.

Gadgets

From CES, it looks like Blu-ray will be the winner of the HD format war. No, the war is not completely over, but this was the landing at Normandy… so to speak. The loss is just too great for the HD-DVD camp to recover.

There are currently 4 responses to “Finds of the Week – January 6, 2008”

Lol I had forgotten about Google Answers…. Yeah that was a bit of a failure from a business P.O.V. I’m thinking there’s going to be a much larger wide-scale failure. My money is on Google Knol or OpenSocial. Google Knol simply won’t be well-received by the WikiPedia community of editors and OpenSocial can’t seem to get anything started.

Great post btw. I’m going to check out that GhostDoc add-on. Log4NET is another thing I’m going to have to look at. Have you checked out ELMAH at all for error logging? That’s a pretty handy tool that I use in my Facebook applications.